Omega Psi Phi Frat House Shooting to Ding Guns on Campus Crusade

When gun control advocates wake up and smell the coffee this morning, they’ll have fresh ammunition for their opposition to campus carry. Methinks someone at Omega Psi Phi was using something stronger than caffeine, and I doubt that any of the combatants had a license to carry, but that fact is sure to be swept aside in the gun controller’s contemplation of the off-campus carnage at Youngstown State University. detnews.com tells us for whom the bell tolls. “Two men have been arrested and charged in a shooting Sunday at an Ohio fraternity house that killed one student and injured 11 people near Youngstown State University, police said Sunday. Each man is charged with aggravated murder, shooting into a house and 11 counts of felonious assault, Youngstown police Chief Jimmy Hughes said.”

I was one who woke up this morning, smelled the coffee and recognized this story as a good one to post about. I mused over the possible pro-gun response. Would arming more of the good young men have saved the day? Just like the Loughner shooting, if we continue to allow the armed bad guys to outnumber us, what else can we expect?

More guns means less gun violence, isn’t that what you guys preach? We’ve got a lot of work ahead of us.

I’ve long wondered about the “more guns = less violence” aspect, and I’m not sure it’s something I want to take a stand on. Lott seems to believe it does, and certainly some believe it’s conventional wisdom that “an armed society is a polite society”; but let’s face it: if there were no guns, then there’d be no gun crime. Pretty simple.

‘cept for that bit about it would not necessarily be a “no crime” situation. Firearms are but one method of committing violence.

Personally, I see more value in other venues. Gun ownership is a right; gun usage can deter crime; a gun owner is not automatically a criminal in the waiting; and so forth. I see a gun as much like the pocket knife that I carry: it has its uses, but is not useful for every problem in life. And perhaps not everyone should have one. But just because some cannot handle pocket knives, we don’t ban all pocket knives.

The thing to analyze in these types of attacks is motive. Was the guy a nut? Were these rivals settling a score over a criminal dispute? How many of the frat house were involved in the dispute?

I don’t know the details of the shooting as far as whether it started in the house or they just fired into the house from the street. If they were standing on the sidewalk shooting at the house it sounds somewhat gang-ish to me.

I haven’t read a thorough story yet, so there’s a lot of blanks that need to be filled in.

Let’s pretend there were no guns, anywhere. What precludes pissed off dude from lobbing a few molotov cocktails, horribly burning a dozen? I’ve got 10 more easy ways to kill everyone in the room without using a gun.

Cold though it may sound, there is always a price to be paid. Lots of people die directly and indirectly because of our use of the automobile. People die from tractors, chainsaws, nailguns, bucket trucks, electricity, the list goes on and on.

Were the causality of mass-shootings simply attributable to the availability of military firearms, Switzerland would be a bloodbath. Were the banning of guns effective in lowering crime, Australia and the UK wold be experiencing crime drops. Instead, they are in the midst of tremendous increases in their crime rates since they effectively barred lawful possession of most firearms. Never stops the bad guys – armed robberies are up in both countries.

Do we all wish tragic incidents like this didn’t happen? Of course. But, history has spoken on this subject thousands of times. There are some societies that are inherently rather non-violent, there are some that are rather more violent. Taking guns from the hands of the average citizen does nothing to curb violence in a violent society. Rather, it empowers the bad guys.

I don’t understand why everyone is making this an issue about the college. It’s a crappy neighborhood plain and simple. I don’t go there at night. The main roads in that area are safe… but get off the beaten path and you’re in another world.

If it had been the same party at the same house but it wasn’t a frat house, the same thing would have happened.